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How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality

Version One Ventures

This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo , a Version One portfolio company. To help us perform functional testing without mock objects, we maintain a seed database that reflects the database schema and contains the data definitions that we would expect in production.

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People Management: Startup Teams Should Dip but not Skip

Both Sides of the Table

As your organization grows and you hire senior staff where you are no longer managing every employee directly the issue of how to manage people that are not your “direct&# reports arises. You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim." Massive proprietary databases?

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. When a startup encounters difficult technical problems, this is the guy you want solving them. As the company grows, hes the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so hes very much in demand. Just change it.

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Scaling is Hard, Case Study: TripAdvisor

Seeing Both Sides

“TripAdvisor is to travel reviews what Kleenex is to tissues.”. . TripAdvisor may be one of the most fascinating companies I know and so I was excited to dig into their business model as part of my series on scaling. Kaufer originally hired writers to product professional reviews and allowed user reviews on a whim.

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CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire.NET programmers

blog.expensify.com

Update: The end is near, Expensify is hiring a.NET programmer! As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. But finding such people is more than a full time job. Indeed, I spend about half my time on it, while Lisa spends about all hers. Expensify Blog. Sunday edit : Still going!

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